Bob Costas And Our Cramped Political Dialogue

The current noise over the unremarkable points raised by Bob Costas the other night concerning this nation's fascination with guns is most remarkable in and of itself as a window into the rest of our national dialogue. What Costas said, and he was seconding columnist Jason Whitlock when he did so, was that Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher might not have found it so easy to kill his girlfriend and himself last Saturday had firearms not been made so easily available in this country, and had not the country allowed itself to become so easily convinced that the current level of gun violence is at worst an unfortunate collateral effect of our experiment in human freedom. That what Costas said is reckoned to be brave — and it was, especially judging by the hysteria it set off on the gun-happy right — is a measure of how truncated our national discussion has become. How have we gone so far off the trolley on this issue — how far has the unremarkable become the remarkable? — that a sportscaster can allude to the possibilities of sensible gun-control on a pre-game show more extensively than did either of the presidential candidates in any of their debates?

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Consider, for example, the remarks of Mike Huckabee, the de-bloated god-bothering whackaloon who is occasionally mistaken for a nice guy.

"Fortunately for I think, America, a lot of people started weighing in on it, first of all pointing out they didn't tune in to watch a football game to get Bob Costas's political commentary. If they wanted to hear left-wing political comments, they'd watch MSNBC, not NBC NFL football."

To Huckabee, political reporters report politics and sports reporters report sports, and never the twain. (Piss off, says I, by the way.) Strange, too, but I don't hear Huckabee complaining when right-wing politics intrude on my enjoyment of watching a football game, or when every damn major sporting event, but especially the Super Bowl, turns into an infomercial for America's military adventures abroad. But more significantly, I'm intrigued that even a brief allusion to the possibility of talking about sensible gun-control belongs solely in the category of "left-wing" political comments on the "left-wing" network (that nonetheless has former Clinton penis-chaser Joe Scarborough as its morning host for three hours every day.?

Ever since the Powell memo set out the template for the rise of the modern infrastructure of the organized Right, one of that infrastructure's great triumphs has been to channel what is perceived to be the acceptable national political dialogue ever to starboard, and to truncate severely the notion of what is an acceptable political idea — even going so far as to eliminate those ideas that already had been deemed acceptable for years, or even decades, as being too "left-wing" for this modern world in which we live in, to quote Sir Paul McCartney in one of his weaker moments. Hence, we end up with what we have today. We have an argument over whether or not to raise the top marginal tax rate into the low 30's, and any proposal to raise it higher — to eliminate the Reagan tax cuts, let alone the Bush tax cuts — is considered fantastical. The debate is over how much to cut entitlements, not truly how to strengthen them. The debate was over how to fashion a health-care plan that kept the insurance companies profitable and in the game, despite the fact the rest of the industrialized world thinks we're insane for doing so at all. There is no serious proposal out there to deal with the Environmental Cliff, which happens to be located in Antarctica, is made of ice, and is cracking off and falling into the sea as we speak. Like gun control, climate change didn't come up in the debates much, either.

A lot of this falls on us. We can be better informed. We can stop believing in nonsense. We can be a more active citizenry. We can choose not to accept the limited parameters of our national debates by turning off the commentators who seek to reinforce them, and by turfing out the politicians who choose to work only within them. We can demand a better range of options. We can demand that obvious problems be confronted, and that real solutions to them be proposed. (Where is the outcry for a national policy on climate change from the drought-ravaged states of the west and the south?) We can demand a political imagination greater than the one currently evinced by our political elites, or we can tell them that we're changing them out for better elites. And maybe then Bob Costas won't be a hero for free speech but, rather, just another nice guy who's making sense.